These are a few selections from a wonderful new book from Ohio University Press, Thomas Larson’s The Memoir and the Memoirist:

“Only by lingering on something outside the self, with which he has had intimate experience, can the author disclose himself. Memoir is a relational form.” (22)

“[T]he subject of a memoir is often the self in search of an earlier or later self, who is found in the person the book gives birth to and whose awareness of past and present, in turn, becomes the focus.” (66)

“What is it about you now that’s so interested in whatever stage you choose? Pressure from the now may help unearth the best phase to explore, especially the unfinished ones that haunt us the most.” (67)

“[T]he memoirist is she who sticks with the form long enough to undergo changes in how she sees the past. The act of memoir writing and its river of recollections has made her different from the person she would have been had she not traversed the rapids. The act has also changed and deepened those predictably indulged and semitrue stories she’s been telling herself and others, no doubt, for years.” (113)

“Once we realize that the here and now has the greatest control over the personal narrative, we are saying, in effect, that the core self can never be found. It can only be activated now and in the succession of now’s memoir writing activates.” (131) (Cool, very Buddhist!)

“Unlike the sum-happy autobiography or the sin-absolving confession, memoir allows a reanimation of, and a relational bout with, one’s authenticity.” (135)

“I think there’s a powerful link between creativity and death. We make things because we lose things: memories, people we love, and ultimately our very selves. Our acts of creation are ways of grappling with death: we imagine it, struggle to make sense of it, forestall or defeat it. When I sat down to write this essay, I realized that all my work–in film or on the page–has ultimately been about dying, and I know I’m not alone. These media are, quite literally, mediums, the means of traveling to the other shore. They are our imaginative transport to the land of the dead. We learn things there, and then return what we learn to the living. This journey is undertaken by anyone who has ever told stories, from Homer, to Dante, to Elizabeth Bishop. To tell stories is to practice of the art of losing.”– from “The Art of Losing: On Writing, Dying, & Mom” by Ruth Ozeki in Shambhala Sun March 2008 p. 73

I got this random piece of paper in an envelope yesterday and it turned out to be my first review. from Kirkus Reviews, dated 1/15/08. Okay….they’re not my mom, so they found stuff that I totally agree with: “the disparity between consequences for activists in a brutal dictatorship and those in a free-speech democracy sometimes makes the author’s examples seem trivializing.” And also “The narrative’s tension is undermined when historical passages are directly succeeded by commentary identifying them as fabrication.” (well, I’d call that fiction and a mixed-genre thing while trying for honesty, but these are quibbles.) Here comes the good part:
“Even so, sharp human insights on the omnipresent complications of living in Nazi Germany make this a worthwhile read. Bumpy, but a unique, imaginative take on the family memoir.”

I walked around the house kind of dazed, and then a half an hour later I said to Donny, “Wait, I think this is a good review.” It is a good review. Bumpy is okay–hell, they could have said hellishly incomprehensible and galling for even existing. “worthwhile,” “unique,” “imaginative…” aww, and they don’t even know me So I’m relieved and glad for such a strange book to be liked.

Today is the first day of class. I have put on an extroverted and caffeinated version of myself. I’ve had conversations with writers about whether or not teaching is “good” for one’s writing, and I think I’m in the category of those whose writing is served by teaching. On good days, I feel as though the conversation in my classes stokes the fire of my own writing by making me consciously articulate the things I care about it writing, the routes I believe are most effective for producing good writing. But some days, too, there’s just an exhaustion that makes the alphabet seem foreign, from space. I have one class to go and I wonder what I should do with these minutes to “refresh” so that talking about writing is not a deathless abstraction.

So I am just getting into the job of being one of the creative nonfiction editors of Literary Mama, an awesome e-zine. I haven’t edited in a while, and I have never had the position of having to select from so many submissions. This will be interesting–like anything else, especially dealing with students and colleagues, I find that a long list of things to do can make me want to be curt and brief with responses. But I am usually in the reverse position, of getting the rejections. I think the letter style I hate the most is, “It was excruciatingly difficult to choose, and we wanted to pick everyone, but we forced ourselves, almost against our better judgment, to reject you.” The style I hate second-most is the Zen-koan brevity of “Not for us.” (That was a real one recently…an online journal that was too busy to type the word “thanks” or to sign the email.) I vow this small vow: I will write “thanks,” because that’s the most important.

Wow, this is amazing. Just got the book jacket illustration today. Makes it seem somehow real!

From The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

“I told her that I, too, was interested in facts, of course, that we had started out on this long series of journeys because we wanted to find the facts. But I said that because of what we’d heard on our trips, I’d also become extremely interested in stories, in the way that the stories multiplied and gave birth to other stories, and that even if these stories weren’t true, they were interesting because of what they revealed about the people who told them. What they revealed about the people who told them, I said, was also part of the facts, the historical record.” (p. 411)

“I did and do believe that if you project  yourself into the mass of things, if you look for things, if you search, you will, by the very act of searching, make something happen that would not otherwise have happened, you will find <span style=”font-style:italic;”>something</span>, even something small, something that will certainly be more than if you hadn’t gone looking in the first place, if you hadn’t asked your grandfather anything at all. I had finally learned the lesson taught me, years after they’d died, by Minnie Spieler and Herman the Barber. There are no miracles, no magical coincidences. There is only looking, and finally seeing, what was always there.” (p. 486)

The book is incredible. Read it.

“I began to read the greats in essay writing–and it wasn’t their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae. By which I mean that organic wholeness of being in a narrator that the reader experiences as reliable; the one we can trust will take us on a journey, make the piece arrive, bring us out into a clearing where the sense of things is larger than it was before.” (p.24)

“These writers might not ‘know’ themselves–that is, have no more self-knowledge than the rest of us–but in each case–and this is crucial–they know who they are<span style=”font-style:italic;”> at the moment of writing</span>.” (p. 30)

“Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life. In fiction, a cast of characters is put to work that will cover all the bases….In nonfiction, the writer has only the singular self to work with. So it is the other in oneself that the writer must seek and find to create movement, achieve a dynamic. Inevitably, the piece builds only when the narrator is involved not in confession but in this kind of self-investigation, the kind that means to provide motion, purpose, and dramatic tension. Here, it is self-implication that is required. To see one’s own part in the situation–that is, one’s own frightened or cowardly or self-deceived part–is to create the dynamic.” (p. 35-36)

From Ann Patchett’s afterward to Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 231-2:
“It’s amazing how you remember everything so clearly,” a woman said, her head wrapped in a bright scarf. “All those conversations, details. Were you ever worried that you might get something wrong?”
“I didn’t remember it,” Lucy said pointedly. “I wrote it. I’m a writer.”
…By telling us that the sentences spoken in the book were not necessarily verbatim, Lucy claimed complete ownership of her history. It was her world and she would present it the way she wanted to. Her memory and desire were indeed the facts. She taught me something while I sat in the audience that night about the nature of writing and the nature of truth. In the right hands, a memoir is the flecks of gold panned out of a great, muddy river. A memoir is those flecks melted down into a shapeable liquid that can then be molded and hammered into a single bright band to be worn on a finger, something you could point to and say, “This? Oh, this is my life.” Everyone has a muddy river, but very few have the vision, patience, and talent to turn it into something so beautiful. This is why the writer matters, so that we can not only learn from her experience but find a way to shape our own. I’m not talking about shaping every life into a work of art, I’m talking about making our life into something we can understand, a portable object that contains the weight and power of an entire terrain.”

One of my students, Brett Dickerson, has an eloquent answer to this question:
“It’s the same type of storytelling we use everyday. When my wife asks how my day was, when Dad tells me about the livestock sale, or when my brother tells me whey he drank so much last weekend, it’s all creative nonfiction.”

“Faction” is Wole Soyinka’s word. It’s also been described as literary journalism, personal essay, impersonal essay, reportage, autobiography, memoir, lyric essay, meditation… <a href= “http://www.billroorbach.com”>Bill Roorbach</a> (in the wonderful Writing Life Stories) describes all these terms and others as fitting under the umbrella of the term “creative nonfiction,” which I also like.